Journalism: the Future
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Journalism: The Future 11. When will newspapers disappear completely? How about other news media like television news and radio journalism? “Times are tough for the newspaper industry,” writes one well-known media analyst. “Advertising is in a slump some analysts are calling the worst in 20 years. Profits are down substantially at many papers. Vacancies are being left unfilled and budgets are being squeezed if not slashed. Almost everywhere...the mood is black. Perhaps because the business has been so lucrative for so long, the painful decline in advertising caught many in the industry unprepared, prompting a wave of anxiety about the future.” That quote is by Alex Jones, then the New York Times media reporter, and it is dated January 6, 1991. Worries that the news business is in trouble are nothing new. What might be new is both the scale of the crisis and the increasingly confident predictions of mass media extinction. A decade and a half into the 21st century, regular forecasts that the printed newspaper will one day (maybe even one day soon) vanish completely appear regularly. In mid-2014, digital theorist Clay Shirky published an analysis, titled “Last Call” and starkly subtitled “The End of the Printed Newspaper.” In it, Shirky sarcastically argued “maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad.” Just a few days earlier, David Carr of the New York Times noted that “Print Was Down, Now Out,” and saw the spinning off of print divisions of multi-media conglomerates into stand-alone companies as the beginning of the end of newspapers in their current form. Predicting the demise of newspapers has a long pedigree: in The Last Newspaper, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Professor Philip Meyer forecast that the last newspaper would be printed in 2043. Even the actor Cedric the Entertainer, appearing on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, speculated the final newspaper would roll of the presses in 2039. All that said it seems unlikely that the newspaper itself will entirely vanish. Even the printed newspaper seems destined to last for a long time in one form or another, and the same goes for a variety of other news media formats. There is a long history of old technologies and media forms being repurposed, even when their original social function has been overtaken by technological, economic, or political changes. For instance, it might have been entirely reasonable to expect that radio would disappear after the invention of television; who, after all, would want to listen to words without pictures once words and pictures together were available? This, of course, is not what happened. Instead, radio shifted from being a national medium to a primarily local medium, ceding the national news agenda for several decades to television (indeed, in 1970 radio actually moved back into the national news business with the founding of NPR). Likewise, the printed newspaper did not vanish with the emergence of radio, despite the “press-radio war” of the 1930s Instead, both the printed newspaper and the growing power of radio news accommodated each other in a variety of unforeseen ways. It’s possible the current shift to digital is more profound than these older changes. It’s possible that printed news published on a more or less daily basis, along with television news updates and radio news, really will vanish. The idea of digital convergence – the fact that what we’re seeing online is not really the emergence of a new medium but the bundling of a variety of formats onto a single technological device— is a powerful argument that many news formats will disappear. But still. Communications history teaches us that we shouldn’t assume media formats entirely vanish, but rather that they often find surprising ways to accommodate each other. This is likely to be as true for whatever we call “television” twenty years from now as for printed news. Rather than disappear, television and print journalism will probably adopt new social roles. 12. What will the “new social roles” of these old media outlets be? Text journalism will increasingly provide context for breaking news events, while visual journalism will focus more on discrete occurrences. And “auditory news” will also focus heavily on a combination of context and story telling. Let’s start by distinguishing what we have long called visual news (television) and news based on text (primarily housed in newspapers but also in magazines), and by noting that these distinctions have become increasingly hard to justify over the last decade and a half. And we’ll probably continue to see the blurring of the lines with regard to these different formats, as journalists are increasingly trained to be proficient (or at least better than adequate) in multiple forms of media production as internet news sites incorporate video, audio, graphical, and narrative text into single stories. There is also an increasing trend at many journalism schools to eliminate different media “tracks” for incoming students As lines between different media format blur, it remains important to keep in mind that different types of media really do different things. They do different things for the reader, who gains different types of knowledge and gratification from each of the stylistic genres, as well as for writers and producers, who understand the journalism they produce in each of these different media formats in slightly different ways . We can expect the social role of visual, video media to remain that of bringing readers dramatic or explanatory information, with an emphasis, on the dramatic end of the moving-image spectrum. However, an increasing percentage of this content will probably be submitted by ordinary people rather than professional journalists. Even today, most news organizations use some amateur footage on a daily basis, with some, like al-Jazeera Arabic, using as many as 11 hours of it per day. In addition, the line between newspapers and weekly or even monthly magazines will continue to shrink, with the amount of “interpretive” or “contextual” journalism continuing to grow. The social context of print, in other words, will shift even further towards narrative and explanation. And this shift will be paralleled online as well, with the continued rise of digital explanatory journalism, quantitative reporting, and contextual information graphics. In other words, we might want to spend less time asking “when will print vanish?” and more time asking “what will print journalism continue to do that it does better than anyone else? How about televisual, audio, and data-oriented journalism? And how will these different forms make citizens either more or less informed about the world around them?” 13. Is there a magic bullet that is going to solve all of journalism’s future revenue problems? Can “ paywalls” save the news? So what are paywalls? One way to think about them is as subscription fences that keep readers from freely accessing online news content. In many ways, the logic behind them is straightforward: just as a newspaper doesn’t show up on your doorstep everyday without your paying for it (though it might if the newspaper delivery worker has made a mistake!) you increasingly can’t gain access to some online journalism without spending money on it. But paywalls won’t save the news. They will grow in importance and increasingly become less controversial. But they aren’t a magic bullet. Indeed, the fact we even have to answer this question (and that we’re calling the barrier between accessing news and paying for it a “paywall” rather than an online subscription) shows just how complex the future of journalistic business models really is, and how much has changed in our discussion of them over the years. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines are now charging their readers for some form of “metered access.” In other words, readers are charged for the news they consume after an initial round of free articles (usually somewhere in the range of 10 articles per month). Even a few years ago, the idea that newspapers would charge their readers for news content was seen as economic heresy, or public interest apostasy, or both. In a 2009 article called “Now Pay Up,” The Economist cited only a few papers, the Wall Street Journal and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette among them, which required readers to pay for access to news online. As is so often the case, the New York Times was at the forefront of a broader change in revenue strategy in the United States; the paper’s introduction of a metered model in the Spring of 2011 led to a veritable stampede of other news properties to introduce metered access over the next several years. (Interesingly, the situation was quite different in Europe, with the Times of London, Le Figaro, Handelsblatt and Berliner Morgenpost--all major European newspapers--all introducing paywalls before the NYTimes.) But, how successful will this strategy be in the long run? The answer to that question is actually fairly simple: meters and walls will provide news organizations with some revenue, but not nearly enough to maintain business operations and staffing levels as they have existed for the past fifty years. Given that, it appears that many companies now charging for news have moved on from the pay wall debate. They have moved beyond, in other words, debates about whether or not to force readers to pay for news: they should, these companies argue. Their strategy now revolves around figuring out how requiring consumers to register for access to content can also help news organizations build up an informational portfolio about the habits, needs, and interests of these very specific and news-focused consumers.